Posts Tagged ‘ipad’

Apple is making its case Tuesday for why it believes it deserves most of the $400 million in damages that is at issue in a partial retrial of last year’s patent infringement case with Samsung. The original jury’s finding of infringement on Samsung’s part, as well as a good chunk of the $1 billion verdict remains intact. However, Judge Lucy Koh ruled that jury erred in how it calculated part of the damages calculation, necessitating the current retrial . Apple argues it is due $379 million for the products at issue, while Samsung has maintained it should only have to pay $52 million. Both sides are appealing various parts of the original issue as well, with Apple seeking injunctions on certain Samsung products and Samsung looking to have the original verdict thrown out due to what it says are multiple procedural errors in the case. While witnesses may forget details and lawyers can make fancy arguments for what could have been, Apple lawyer Bill Lee argued that the paperwork in the case supports the case that Apple’s patents are significant and were important to the company’s effort to catch up to the iPhone and iPad, which Lee characterized as revolutionary and gorgeous, citing press reports. “Documents don’t lie,” Apple lawyer Bill Lee said, beginning its closing argument in the case

Don’t get too excited about an intriguing story from the Albany Times Union saying that chip-manufacturing company GlobalFoundries may soon start turning out chips for Apple’s iPhones and iPads at a factory in upstate New York . I’ve been checking with industry sources who have a pretty clear picture about what may be going on. And it’s probably not all that it’s initially cracked up to be. In the most likely scenario, Samsung will still be the primary manufacturer of Apple’s chips for the iPhone and iPad, they said, continuing the role it has played since the earliest days of the iPhone: Building the chips that Apple designs under contract. (In chip-industry lingo, these deals are known as foundry agreements.) Sources close to the situation said the deal that appears to be taking shape looks more like this: Samsung will use GlobalFoundries for what is known as “flex capacity.” This is a long-standing industry practice under which a chip manufacturer pays to occasionally use another company’s factories when demand on their own factory is running higher than they would like, and they need a little help. This would be a good time to point out that Apple is not Samsung’s only foundry customer. The Samsung fab in Austin, Texas, also turns out chips for Samsung. Occasionally there will be times when Samsung has to balance the demand on that fab in order to meet both the needs of its primary foundry customer — Apple — as well as its own internal needs for smartphone and tablet chips. That’s where GlobalFoundries will come in, picking up the additional work on an as-needed basis. Samsung would basically hire GlobalFoundries as a subcontractor, and continue to manage the relationship with Apple. This is a very different business relationship than, say, if Apple were to tap GlobalFoundries as a “second source” for chips. Apple would of course have to give its blessing to the arrangement. This would explain why Samsung employees have been spotted in Malta, N.Y., where GlobalFoundries operates Fab 8 , and is said to have brought the “recipes” for building Apple chips with them. Additionally, there are enough similarities in chip-making technologies and equipment between Samsung and GlobalFoundries that Global can do the job when called upon

There are lots of people who want to stream Web video to your house. But odds are that if you’re watching a Web video during primetime hours, it’s coming from one of two places: Netflix or YouTube. So says Sandvine, the broadband service company. Sandvine says Netflix and Google’s video site now account for more than half of America’s “downstream” traffic delivered over “fixed networks” — the kind you get at home or at work — during peak hours. That comes from Sandvine’s latest traffic report, and it shows the same trend we’ve been seeing for a while : Netflix accounts for about a third of peak Web traffic in the U.S ., and YouTube is coming up on 20 percent. Sandvine’s report also says that Hulu and Amazon, despite big efforts to catch up to Netflix in video delivery, are coming up short. At least if you’re counting bits. Here’s what Sandvine’s most recent downstream totals look like: And here’s where they were back in May 2013: It is possible that Hulu, or Amazon, or any of the providers that lag far behind Netflix are much more efficient at delivering Web video signals, and that somehow Sandvine’s numbers drastically underrepresent their real usage numbers. Could be! On the other hand, these numbers have been pretty consistent for a while. If you’re looking for an interesting wrinkle in Sandvine’s numbers, check out their report on traffic delivered over mobile networks — which doesn’t include traffic to your Android, iPhone, whatever when you’re on Wifi– and what it says about YouTube traffic and Facebook traffic. Here are the most recent numbers: And here’s what they looked liked back in the spring: It’s sort of interesting to see Facebook shoot up so much in the last few months — perhaps the company’s newest updates are data hungry?

T-Mobile figures that by giving tablet users free data , it might turn a few of them into paying customers. But it turns out that giving away data is sometimes harder than it seems. T-Mobile’s operations — both human and computer-based — were just not set up to have a nonpaying relationship with customers. As a result, some of the company’s new tablet customers were erroneously charged $10 per month for data that was supposed to be free. T-Mobile has since corrected the problem, and plans to issue refunds to affected customers. “We had a technology glitch and a training issue that caused some people to believe [they were being charged] — and some people to be charged,” T-Mobile chief marketing officer Mike Sievert said in an interview. “That’s just not right.” T-Mobile’s plan does allow tablet buyers to bring over any new or existing tablet that’s compatible with T-Mobile’s network and get 200 megabytes of free data each month. On the iPad, for example, customers don’t even need to enter a credit card number, Sievert said.

Apple’s decision to shift its iPad launches to the fall from earlier in the year appears to have undermined its standing versus rival tablet makers. With no new iPads to drive sales, Apple’s share of the worldwide tablet market slipped to its lowest point ever in the third quarter of 2013, according to the latest data from IDC. The research firm says that iPad shipments for the period topped out at 14.1 million units, up less than one percent from the same period a year earlier. At the same time, Apple’s share of the tablet market fell to 29.6 percent from 40.2 percent a year earlier, charting its lowest point to date. The iPad’s slowing growth in the quarter proved a real boon to Android tablet makers. Samsung, Asus, Lenovo and Acer all saw big year-over-year gains in shipments and market share, with Samsung — Apple’s arch rival — shipping 9.7 million tablets to claim a share of 20.4 percent, a gain of 123 percent over the 12.4 percent market share it captured in the third quarter of 2012. An unfortunate decline for Apple, though perhaps not as concerning as it might be. With the iPad Air shipping Friday after a volley of laudatory reviews and the new Retina display iPad mini headed to market “later in November,” Apple’s certain to chart some significant tablet market growth this quarter. And the annual holiday shopping binge will likely amplify it. “With two 7.9-inch [iPad mini] models starting at $299 and $399, and two 9.7-inch [iPad] models starting at $399 and $499, Apple is taking steps to appeal to multiple segments,” IDC analyst Jitesh Ubrani said in a statement. And what of the broader tablet market? How’s that doing? It’s still growing, though not as quickly as it had been. Third-quarter tablet shipments totaled 47.6 million units, up 36.7 percent over the same quarter last year. Significant growth, obviously, but a big decline from the 60 percent growth of the second quarter.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of some of the news that powered AllThingsD this week: OK, deep breath. Everything you need to know about Apple’s iPad-and-MacBook refresh event , held this Tuesday in San Francisco: The company introduced a new, thinner 10-inch iPad ; the iPad Mini got an A7 chip and a “retina” display ; the new MacBook Pro is also thinner (surprised?); Mac OS X Mavericks is free and available to download now (and here’s why that makes sense ); iLife and iWork will be free with new hardware running Mavericks; the new Mac Pro ships in December ; and, finally, Apple is keeping the iPad 2 up for sale because it can . There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? If you prefer pretty pictures to text, though, here’s the event in slideshow form . As expected, the other product events on Tuesday got a bit overshadowed by Apple, but Nokia’s event in Abu Dhabi included three medium-large announcements. The company showed off its first Windows 8 tablet , as well as two new Lumia phablets and a host of upcoming Windows Phone 8 apps, including ( finally! ) Instagram.

Can a network merge its digital unit with the rest of the corporate structure? Comedy Central thinks it can—today, the network is announcing it’s done exactly that. The next question, of course, is how the agency and client worlds will react. “We basically dismantled the department formerly known as digital,” said Michele Ganeless, president of the network. “We had a digital team that made digital content and digital marketing and scheduled the digital platforms, and then ... we realized that our audience doesn’t think of it that way. And we shouldn’t, either.” Accordingly, David Bernath is now evp, programming and multiplatform strategy, and Walter Levitt is now CMO. (Kent Alterman became president, content development and original programming earlier this year.) Across the network, among employees who manned Twitter feeds or posted fan art to Facebook accounts, Ganeless said, “Everyone who was speaking directly to our viewers now works in marketing.” But how does all this work with an agency world that is still to some extent siloed into digital and linear groups? Gibbs Haljun, managing director, media investment at GroupM, says it should work pretty well given that most agencies are already requiring their digital and linear divisions to work closely. “Everybody, regardless of whether the groups are separate or not, has to work closely together,” said Haljun. “You’re going to have video that lives on three different plans. It’s going to live on print in my iPad editions, it’s going to live on TV, and it’s going to live on digital video.” Naturally, it behooves a network that targets the 18-34 demo keep up with the times. Nielsen decided back in February to redefine what constituted a TV watching household and began including connected TV viewing

iOS 7 was supposed to make it easier for schools to manage the iPads that are becoming increasingly common in the classroom. But for some, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system is proving to be a bit of a headache. A number of schools that have upgraded their iPad deployments to iOS 7 say installing the new OS removed the supervision profiles they had installed on the devices. This rendered those iPads unsupervised, depriving administrators of their remote management privileges and eliminating the filtering protections they had established to protect students from inappropriate content they might stumble upon outside school. “Apple did not realize that installing iOS 7 would remove our (and thousands of organizations across the country) safety protection measure, which now makes the iPad devices unfiltered when accessing the Internet away from school,” said a memo from the Manitou Springs (Colo.) School District 14 to parents, verified by AllThingsD . “In the short term, the district will be collecting iPad devices at the end of each day until the safety protection measure is reinstalled.” And Manitou Springs School District 14 is not an isolated case. According to Apple’s support forums and some external IT discussion boards, schools across the United States are grappling with the issue, which is causing a lot of angst and frustration for administrators. At Manitou, the district ended up collecting hundreds of iPads that had been upgraded to iOS 7, wiping them, and then reinstalling the OS along with the apps and student content originally on the devices.

For the past week, I’ve been talking out loud to my iPad — a lot. My conversing with inanimate objects might not come as a complete surprise to those who know me well, but even they might be shocked (concerned?) at the things I was yelling at my tablet. “Fruit bat!” “Pickup truck!” “Corn!” But I haven’t gone off the deep end just yet. Instead, I’ve been testing a new interactive kids’ app called The Winston Show by ToyTalk . [ See post to watch video ] Created by former Pixar employees, The Winston Show is an entertainment-focused app for children ages four and up, though there is a small educational aspect to it. It centers around a variety show hosted by a friendly yellow blob named Winston, and your child gets to be the star of the show. The app is free, but it requires a Wi-Fi or cellular connection, and is currently only available for the iPad. Since many kids today interact with smartphones and tablets, the main goal behind The Winston Show is to engage children through conversation and not just through a series of taps and swipes on a screen. The app does so by using a combination of speech-recognition technology and artificial intelligence to get Winston to listen and reply to your child’s responses. Overall, I found The Winston Show to be an amusing and captivating app that’s much more personal than some other interactive kid’s toys I’ve tested, like Talking Friends Superstar . When I let a couple of my friends’ kids play with it, they enjoyed telling Winston about their favorite sports, participating in quiz shows, and helping with story time. But it wasn’t all fun and games

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Talk NYC/WW is your daily download of the tech, marketing and advertising news you need to know. It’s smartly curated to keep you up to speed on the innovators and innovations that are shaking up the digital world today.